I am against them. People are always talking and talking while they are making them. I am against prose pottery. I am against mindless, free-association pottery. I am against love pottery. I am against free clay pottery. I am against the hundreds of forms of formal pottery. I am against pottery as a fine art. I am against pottery workshop programs all over the country that turn out thousands of master artisans every year making competent pots but who will never make a beautiful pot. They compete with my true-to-life and lovely pots at the local charity bazaar. I am against Creative Shaping teachers who tell students though they have issues, they too can make pots. The art of pottery should be like it used to be. Now more people make pots than use pots. I am against people saying what we need is a new marketing scheme. I got it. What if we make everyone write poetry to inscribe on their pots? That should cut down drastically on the number of people making pots.
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's first full length poetry manuscript They Say This Is How Death Came into the World was published by Mayapple Press. His second book, Wires Over the Homeplace was published in 2013 by Pinyon Publishing. His poetry and flash have appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Sentence, Mid-American Review, Laurel Review, Potomac Review, Pleaides, and Bellevue Literary Review, among many other online and print publications.
Dickey teaches philosophy in Omaha, NE.
We’ve published two more poems by Dickey: “How You Prove Anything and Everything” and “The Kindness.”
